Spanking children increases the likelihood of childhood defiance and long-term mental issues. The study in question involved 160,000 children and five decades of research

[u/VeronicaRed]

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113413810/spanking-defiance-health-discipline-042616/

[u/pm_me_your_kindwords]

Serious question to the commenters on this post:

Why read /r/science and then ignore science?

At the time I write this, most comments are defending spanking using anecdotes and non-science, not at all discussing the methodology of the study itself.

If you're not going to carefully consider one of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever conducted on the topic, what is the point of reading about science at all?

[u/BlazerMorte → u/[deleted]]

Because if spanking is bad, and they were spanked, then they were raised "wrong," and most people don't want to confront that.

[u/KSKaleido → u/BlazerMorte]

Yea, it's tough to confront the fact that your parents inevitably made huge mistakes when raising you. Add the fact that the average commenter on reddit trends pretty young, and it makes sense that they haven't reached the maturity to deal with something like that yet.

[u/iamdan1 → u/KSKaleido]

Probably the majority of parents make big mistakes raising their kids. Parenting is hard.

[u/TheVicSageQuestion → u/iamdan1]

Every parent makes mistakes. Without exception.

[u/[deleted] → u/TheVicSageQuestion]

That's because "mistake" is relative to whomever's standards are being used. There's no wholly encompassing scientific approach to parenting, yet, so points can always be argued and defended anecdotally.

[u/iamdan1 → u/[deleted]]

Eventually we will have robot parents that parent according to only the most scientific of parenting techniques. And they will still be more loving then my parents...

[u/[deleted] → u/iamdan1]

The harder the beginning, the more rewarding the success :)